Use Airtable as a Scheduler (Assign staff with set times)

Tony_Sullivan · ‎Aug 26, 2021

Not sure if this is the best place to put this request, feel free to move elsewhere if there’s a better fit.

I am looking at ways to use Airtable as a scheduler for transportation routes. I have a rough idea of how it would work but do not know how to use the views and data to make this happen in a way that would benefit my operation. Here are some of the things I am looking for:

1] Calendar or Gantt view by day: Since we would be assigning trips on a daily basis, I’d like to be able to use the calendar or gantt view to adjust on a day by day basis, using times of the day
2] Assign trips to drivers: I could have a separate table that contains all of our drivers, and then use drag and drop to assign routes to those drivers
3] Keep trip times set: Trip times would be set fields, as in if a trip is from 10am until 11am, it couldn’t be changed to a 1-2pm trip via drag and drop or anything else

Ultimately I am looking at this drag and drop interface to assign trips to upwards of 100-150 drivers. Is this something that could be leveraged within Airtable?

Justin_Barrett · ‎Sep 02, 2021

The drag-and-drop behavior that you describe isn’t currently possible in Airtable, at least not in the way that you’re probably picturing it. The only view type that supports drag-and-drop behavior for changing record data is the Kanban view, but that drives the value of a single-select field, which wouldn’t be a good choice for either drivers or trips. What you effectively need is a junction table that lets you connect drivers from a [Drivers] table with trips that you’ve created in a [Trips] table. That’s done by using link fields, and those only let you pick items from a list.

If you use a calendar view (from #1 on your list) to view trips on the [Trips] across an entire day, it would be possible to drag trips around on the calendar and change the underlying data. The only way to prevent this would be to set the permissions for the start and end fields to “Nobody”, meaning that nobody is allowed to edit those values. When you need to edit a trip, you’d have to change the permissions to allow editing, then change them back to prevent accidental changes.

There may be ways to optimize some of the regular maintenance of this information using scripts and/or automations, and possibly third-party tools that give you different ways of managing the data instead of using Airtable’s native interface. I suggest hiring a consultant who can work with you to design the system in the most effective way.